Utilizing the Safe Streets Now playbook

This week’s question deals with a complaint about a neighbor who performs auto repair for multiple vehicles at his home.

This week’s question deals with a complaint about a neighbor who performs auto repair for multiple vehicles at his home.

Steven P. Dinkin

Dear Mediator:

Our neighborhood has a longstanding problem with a property owner who repairs cars all night long, with lots of banging noises and people coming and going. Our street is not zoned for an auto repair shop. Our Neighborhood Watch group has complained repeatedly to police, city staff and elected officials. They all say the same thing: He has been cited, he has agreed to clean up his property, and they will monitor the situation. But instead of cleaning up, he keeps adding more cars to his lawn and along our street.

In a perfect metropolis, agencies that enforce city codes would have enough resources and tenacity to pursue justice relentlessly, and violators would face swift consequences.

In the real world of modern cities, code enforcement units are underfunded and overburdened, and the imposition of penalties involves herculean administrative work. Knowing that, offenders can keep on offending with rueful promises of compliance they never intend to keep.

The resulting cat-and-mouse game — the sluggish municipal cat never quite catching the wily scofflaw mouse — puts too many neighborhoods in a state of siege.

Our community mediators are well-versed in these standoffs. One of the resolution strategies they offer is based on the Safe Streets Now initiative, a model that could give your group a new path forward.

Launched in California in 1990, Safe Streets Now empowers citizens to carry out their own nuisance abatement measures through civil courts. The program began as a response to illegal drug activity in residential communities, but it quickly expanded to cover boisterous party houses, incessantly barking dogs and industrial activities that pose environmental risks.

Such public scourges are addressed by California Civil Codes 3479 and 3480, which rule out “anything which is injurious to health ... so as to interfere with the comfortable enjoyment of life or property” and “which affects at the same time an entire community or neighborhood.”

The last phrase is pivotal. An individual who lives next to a house-from-hell faces a lonely uphill battle. Several neighbors with such a house in their midst can join forces.

Your group has already completed the first two of the four steps in the Safe Streets Now playbook. You have “documentation” of the infractions (and you should continue building that record of notes and photos), and you have carried out “notification” of authorities, who in turn have notified the violator.

Steps three and four are “negotiation” and “litigation” via San Diego County’s small claims court, which allows individuals to seek up to $10,000 in civil damages. Given how long this problem of environmental toxins and disruptive noise has lasted, your group might consider pursuing both steps simultaneously.

The key to the success of Safe Streets Now has been neighbors filing consolidated small claims cases that put defendants at risk of substantial civil judgments. The threat of financial ruin, especially where evidence of wrongdoing is clear, can move people from intransigence to compliance.

These are the legal options available to your group. Now let’s consider the human dimensions of the problem.

A person who persists in operating an illegal business in the face of imminent reprisals is suffering from one of two afflictions: delusion that he can somehow evade justice or desperation because he sees no other course.

Either way, this man could use assistance. Offer to help him scout alternative sites for fixing cars by drawing on your group’s collective resources. That could provide the stimulus he needs to get his business on a viable footing.

His personal difficulties are not relevant under the law. But engaging him in an effort to surmount those difficulties would be an act of neighborly kindness. Such an exchange would help you understand his situation, and you’ll need that when you enter mediation and work with him on achieving resolution.

Steven P. Dinkin is a professional mediator who has served as president of the San-Diego based National Conflict Resolution Center since 2003.

Do you have a conflict that needs a resolution? Please share your story with The Mediator via email at mediatethis@ncrconline.com. All submissions will be kept anonymous.